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She’s the One Holding the Keys

GATEKEEPER Ms. Gallagher works out of the house on Marlborough Road in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, that she and her husband bought in 1959. She will only leave, she says, feet-first.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

By design, there is no
“For Sale”
sign staked outside the formidable 12-room colonial-style house at 225 Marlborough Road in Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Park South neighborhood. The pale stucco home, built for the long haul in 1922 but lately a bit under the weather, is in need of someone to coddle it. But Mary Kay Gallagher, the woman charged with finding that someone, is not interested in drive-by gentrifiers who might be seduced by its location and curb appeal.

Signs, Ms. Gallagher said, attract attention-wasting voyeurs, not serious buyers. She can discern the difference in a heartbeat. Psychology is a big part of the real estate game.

“A sign is a sign of desperation,” she said simply, definitively.

If Ms. Gallagher, who began referring to some sellers as greedy back in the Gordon Gekko-esque 1980s, cannot say it with authority, she does not say it. Every syllable is a declaration: “I’m honest, and not everybody in this business is.”

Mary Kay Gallagher got into real estate as a kind of civic duty, to help find responsible guardians for the shingled, gabled and columned behemoths in her own backyard. Forty years later, at 90, having become wealthy by selling — and reselling — these homes on what used to be seen as the wrong side of Prospect Park, Ms. Gallagher still envisions the business that way. If the lovely but too often unloved landmark homes of Victorian Flatbush outlive her intact, she can die a happy woman.

Despite her age and recent double knee-replacement surgery, Ms. Gallagher remains the heart, soul and boss of the boutique real estate firm that bears her name. She specializes in — detractors say monopolizes — the 2.5 square miles bordered by Prospect Park, Avenue H, Coney Island Avenue and Ocean Avenue, commonly called Ditmas Park (though it is actually 12 microneighborhoods, whose distinctive qualities she will happily expound upon). It is her turf, and she guards it with the bellicose vigilance of a junkyard dog. Julie Kestyn, a longtime competitor with her own eponymous firm, called her an icon.

Photo

MAKING HER PITCH Ms. Gallagher supervises as prospective buyers examine a home in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. “Oak parquet. Original moldings. A fireplace!”Credit
Swoan Parker for The New York Times

“Mary Kay was the broker who, in the white-flight days when the neighborhoods all around Brooklyn were going down, helped keep this neighborhood good,” said Ms. Kestyn, who is 66 and lives in Midwood. “I get along with her, but there are people who don’t. She’s tough. I’ve been waiting for her to retire for the last 23 years, but why should she?”

Ms. Gallagher — grandmother of nine, great-grandmother of four — works out of the barn-red, seven-bedroom house at 196 Marlborough that she and her husband bought for $29,500 in 1959. It is a privilege granted decades ago by the state licensing board after she lectured officials on why that made perfect sense: houses like hers on blocks like hers are what she markets, so why waste anybody’s time in an anonymous office on some busy boulevard? She was instructed to post her broker’s plaque in a front window, which is where it remains. She is coy about her commission, but insists it is lower than the going rate of 5 or 6 percent, and she says she always reduces it on sales above $1 million because “enough is enough.”

Some say Ms. Gallagher saved this time capsule, composed of sprawling one-family homes, no two quite alike, from being chopped up into boarding houses or infiltrated by apartment buildings. Others say she unfairly steered minority buyers from the best properties. Ms. Gallagher, a nightly devotee of Bill O’Reilly, is no diplomat, and sure, her best friends (most of them dead) were white. And yes, she tends to grill prospective owners like a one-woman co-op board.

“But I sell to blacks, to Asians, to Republicans; I sell to Jewish people, even though I would make a bad Jew because they have too many rules,” Ms. Gallagher said. “I don’t think I’m racist. I don’t say I’m such a good Catholic, either, but I know I’m not a bad one.”

The stucco at 225 Marlborough was the first house she ever sold, in 1970, for $59,000, to a doctor who wanted to walk to work from his own Victorian-style home down the block. He ripped out the kitchen, turned the elegant first floor into an office suite and the second into an in-law apartment. Forty years later, after his death, his family — naturally — retained Mary Kay Gallagher. Asking price: $890,000 (reduced to $850,000).

“I want to sell it to someone who restores it back to a one-family home,” she said after an open house that failed to net an offer. “But what I want, I don’t always get. Buyers these days don’t want to do any renovating. Especially if both the husband and wife have jobs. Who has time to sit around waiting for the contractor? They want things to be perfect, even in an old house.”

•

Ms. Gallagher, who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, one of five children of a leather salesman, got into real estate quite unintentionally at age 50. She was married with six children, that big house to keep up, and a hard-won tennis membership in the hitherto WASP-only Knickerbocker Field Club. But she was civic-minded. And the antithesis of a shrinking violet.

As suburbia beckoned many of the middle-class white families that had populated the Flatbush area, the minority population surged to 20 percent in 1970 from 2 percent in 1960 (today, it is 58 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian), and blockbusting by brokers wanting to repurpose the area became a viable threat. Once the so-called Old Guard moved out, what mattered to her was replacing them with owners who cared enough and could afford to maintain their properties and preserve the neighborhood’s aesthetic. In 1970, Elliot Miller, then president of the Prospect Park South Civic Association, convinced Ms. Gallagher that she had the chops to recruit people like herself and her husband, Jack, who ran his family’s funeral home business on nearby Church Avenue. He told her to regard it as a community service. She did, and does.

“I don’t sell houses, I show them,” she said. “I push, but I’m not pushy. I push up the neighborhood. I don’t pull those real estate agent stunts. I live here. I care who moves in, because what happens to these houses matters to me.”

She never imagined it would make her a millionaire. In 2004 she became the first to sell a home in Victorian Flatbush for seven figures — a yellow palace on 17th Street that went for $1.17 million. Her most expensive listing ever was the Tara look-alike on Albemarle Road for $4.2 million in 2005 — she said she was relieved when it failed to sell. “It was a ridiculous price,” she admitted. “I knew people were saying, ‘What’s she been smoking?’ ”

Ms. Gallagher was one of the ringleaders pushing for Prospect Park South’s landmark designation, which it gained in 1979, the first of five of the area’s microneighborhoods to do so. Vinyl siding and bricked-over facades, along with the invasion of corporate real estate firms that delved deeper into Brooklyn in sync with rising property values, are the bane of her existence. When This Old House magazine ranked Ditmas Park among the top dozen places to buy an oldie in the United States, it seemed almost a tribute to her life’s work.

“Corcoran and those other ones who come over here from Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope are a thorn in my side, but I still have the best houses,” she said. “Most people who want to buy or sell a house in this neighborhood know enough to come see me. I am a resource. No one knows this neighborhood like I do.”

She is, as her granddaughter and heir apparent, Alexandra Reddish, observed, “essentially a brand.”

“This is her whole life,” noted Ms. Reddish, 30. “It’s not just one big transaction.”

•

A handful of young people eager to trade the convenience of brownstone Brooklyn for the space and grace of Victorian Flatbush were on the forlorn doorstep of 225 Marlborough by 1 p.m. on a recent Sunday for the open house. A few brought their checkbooks.

“Hello, I’m Mary Kay,” Ms. Gallagher hollered into the expansive foyer. She wore an ancient cardigan, baggy corduroys and sensible shoes. On bad-knee days like this one, she is the downstairs docent while grandchildren act as tour guides of the upper floors.

Though the original sale helped secure her a broker’s license, she was never totally happy about it. Undoing the changes made by the doctor and restoring the home’s original integrity will, she said, be daunting and expensive. “Here, take a brochure and a map,” she commanded all who walked in, generous with both handouts and opinions on the home’s untapped potential. “You’re going to have to use your imagination on this first floor, but take down these Sheetrock walls, put in a kitchen, and look at the space you’ve got. Oak parquet. Original moldings. A fireplace!”

Heads nodded, and a bunch of imaginations proceeded to engage in renovation pipe dreams, apparently undaunted by the asking price or a backyard that cozies up to subway tracks. “There is a little bit of noise from the back,” she acknowledged. Later, she explained, “I don’t want to kill the sale, but you have to be honest with people about what they’re getting into.”

It reminded Ms. Gallagher of the young man who showed up with a magnet and a marble to see a century-old house: “I don’t remember what the magnet was for, but he told me he brought the marble to test the floors: if it rolled at all, it meant the house was flawed.” Ms. Gallagher told the young man it was idiotic to think that houses don’t settle a bit in 100 years. Occasionally it can be worth losing a buyer.

In 2009, Ms. Gallagher’s firm sold seven homes, the fewest of any year since she began. She has sold two so far in 2010 — 694 East 17th Street, for $1.075 million; 1409 Glenwood Road for $925,000 — plus a co-op apartment, and has contracts signed on two more houses and another apartment. The market, she said, is “coming up.”

The first open house of the year, on Valentine’s Day, was at 722 Argyle Road, a vacant spring-green Victorian-style home listed for $995,000. Ms. Gallagher stood guard in blue baseball cap, vintage camel’s hair coat and beat-up leather gloves: the heat would not work, even for her.

But she plowed on, apologizing to visitors with an indignant shrug toward the balky boiler in the basement and extolling the virtues of the place: “So much breathing room! And a turret!” She got two offers that day and recently sent it into contract for $910,000.

Her listings are posted on her handsome, modest Web site — she says she created the first Brooklyn real estate site, in the late 1990s — and elsewhere online. But she said she relied as much on word of mouth, which is how she found her own house half a century ago: by chatting up a local homeowner after becoming disenchanted with the (male) real estate agent showing her around. She maintains that men make lousy real estate brokers because they do not pay attention to their clients’ wish lists, which in her case specified a driveway (she kept getting parking tickets in Prospect-Leffert Gardens), a serious front porch and closet space for a family of eight.

Ms. Gallagher faithfully backs her blue 2005 Mercedes E320 into that driveway, a maneuver that inspires equal parts awe and incredulity among her neighbors, many of whom bought their homes from her.

“We were wandering through the neighborhood checking out the houses and we ran into an elderly couple who asked if we were looking to buy a home,” said Amy Glosser, who with her husband, Janno Lieber, bought a seven-bedroom home three doors down from Ms. Gallagher’s in 2000. “When we told them we were, they said, ‘Then you must see Mary Kay Gallagher: she’s the mayor of the neighborhood.’

“Mary Kay is like old wine, full of contrasts; she’s wonderfully direct and charming at the same time,” added Ms. Glosser, a 44-year-old mother of three. “But she was the only one selling houses here in the ’70s and ’80s, when people couldn’t bail out fast enough. The old-timers all attribute the stability of this neighborhood to her.”

Inside Ms. Gallagher’s home are two computers and two land lines. There are phones in every room — yes, including the three and a half bathrooms. Ms. Gallagher gripes about being available 24/7 for “Nervous Nellie” buyers and sellers, but said that her only real regret about her career is that it forced her and her husband to give up Jets season tickets: she has always worked Sundays.

Her concession to the chronological reality of being 90 is a motorized chair that whisks her upstairs. Her children insisted she have it installed after her knee replacements last year. For Christmas, she bought herself a 50-inch plasma television to watch sports.

“The oldest thing in this house is me,” she said, settling into a recliner (the house itself was built in 1903). “I never used to tell people how old I was because I thought it might hurt the business. Nobody believes I’m 90, anyway.”

She has lived here alone since her husband died of a heart attack in 2001, and said she would leave feet-first: “You’d never get me into a condo, and anyway, my family would die if I ever sold this house.” She estimates it could sell for $1.2 million — the 1960s kitchen and baths could use some updating.

Ms. Gallagher’s first intended successor, her daughter Eileen Cullen, worked alongside her for 10 years before her death from breast cancer in 2005. “We really worked well together, and after she died, I thought, ‘Oh, this is it for the business; I can’t handle it alone,’ ” she said. “But Alexandra picked it up right away; she’ll be Mary Kay Gallagher Real Estate someday. Or she can call it whatever she wants.”

Ms. Reddish said she did not plan a name change. “In the first place, my grandmother is going to live forever. And in the second place, they didn’t change the name Corcoran, did they?”

Correction: April 18, 2010

An article last Sunday about Mary Kay Gallagher, 90, a real estate broker who specializes in the Victorian Flatbush section of Brooklyn, misidentified the formerly WASP-only club that she joined half a century ago. It is the Knickerbocker Field Club, a tennis club in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn  not the Knickerbocker Club, an all-male social club in Manhattan.

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2010, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: She’s the One Holding the Keys. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe